Shimaoka Shuzo

Est. 1863

In 2006, fire tore through Shimaoka Shuzo, a small sake brewery that had stood in Ota City, Gunma, since 1863. Toshinobu Shimaoka, the sixth generation of his family to run the kura, seriously considered closing for good. Buildings and tanks could be replaced. What worried him was something you can’t buy: the two strains of natural lactic acid bacteria that had lived in the brewery for generations and made its traditional yamahai sake possible.

Fortunately, the brewery had kept samples of those strains. Once the kura was rebuilt, they were reintroduced into the new brewery, where they took hold once again, and production carried on. So did the method Shimaoka Shuzo has followed since its founding: kimoto-style yamahai, a slow, demanding way of raising the yeast starter that relies on the winter cold and on the lactic acid bacteria living in the brewery itself. It takes skilled brewers, careful temperature control and plenty of time, and it produces sake with a firm backbone and deep, savory flavor.

Shimaoka came to the family business by a roundabout path. After university he worked for a company in Tokyo, then studied brewing at Japan’s national brewing research institute in Hiroshima before returning home to take over. Today he is both president and toji, and he keeps things deliberately small: about 500 koku a year, or roughly 90,000 liters, a scale he says lets the people working there actually enjoy the craft. He compares sake making to traditional arts like lacquerware and pottery, keeps the lineup short, and steers clear of trendy ingredients.

The brewery’s sake rests on three things: the yamahai method, rice grown in Gunma (about 70% of its sake uses the local Wakamizu variety), and patience. Most of its regular sake ages in tank for one to two years before bottling, something few breweries did when Shimaoka started. The well water, fed by springs from Mount Akagi, is relatively hard by Japanese standards, which keeps the sake stable as it matures. Shimaoka describes aging as polishing a rough stone: time doesn’t add flavor so much as wear away the sharp corners, leaving a good stone with real character.

For all that tradition, he has little interest in advertising it. He doesn’t care to print terms like “wild yeast” on his labels, and jokes that he doesn’t even need to write “yamahai.” His standard is simpler: “As long as it turns out delicious, that’s all that matters.” He would rather hear a neighbor say “it’s cheap, but it’s good” than sell a bottle on a marketing claim, and he wants his sake to leave you a little warmer and more at ease, like a bowl of homemade miso soup at the end of a long day. Sake on its own, he says, isn’t the whole experience; it should always leave room for food.

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